hello Keijo, do you want this rect to be redrawn in the Onpaint of your form. or just drawn temporarily over other controls (until a paint happens)? If you want to draw over controls then putting a control over the other controls (as you said) will do it, if you can't do that then you can hide the controls that are in the same place as your rect and show them when the rect is gone, if you have partially covered controls then they will dissapear (a few controls could be resized to still be visible). I think it's posible to change the update area of a window but if you take the rect area out of the Main Form's update area then the rect won't be drawn. It seems the windows OS is very good at making sure all visible controls are drawn where they are suppose to be. Also you might try a timer event triggered by the OnPaint that allows a few microseconds and then Paints the Rectangle on the Forms Canvas.You may look at windows API

There are two kinds of controls in delphi, wincontrols and non-windowed controls, Windowed controls will always show on top of non windowed ones.

Here are a couple of methods not already discussed..

In win2k and above you can use 'alpha blending' and transparency. I think Delphi 6 comes with a transparancy demo, also the delphi magazine did an article on it. If you use a transparent form or panel on top of the image you want then you will see the image but the (invisible) buttons will still work.

Marco Cantu used to have some kind of transparency demo too. I remember some kind of 'click through' where the mouse events get passed through to the windows underneath.

A final way is to use owner draw controls and bitmap buttons, so that each control paints its own piece of the picture, The controls know where they are so they could copy the corresponding parts from a TImage.

as

Oh hang on, here is an easy way..

Put a panel on top of the whole form and the enabled property to false.. All the buttons and Edits still work, you just cant see them. If you want you can grab the underlying form image and blend it with the picture you are displaying, like this.

See how one of the leading financial services organizations uses Recorded Future as part of a holistic threat intelligence program to promote security awareness and proactively and efficiently identify threats.

and then place one such control over all your other controls. You can install it in the IDE and do that at design time or you can instantiate it at runtime in the Create of the carrying form.

It "almost" works seamlessly, i.e. some standard controls are not supporting well the presence of this "overlay" and do produce unavoidable side-effects. One notable example would be a TreeView "covered" by this object. When the TreeView scrolls, the scroll is made partially by shifting the pixels on the screen rather than redrawing the TreeView and that messes with the pixels "overdrawn" by the transparent control. You can partially fix that by handling the redraw notify events from the covered controls but it's very form-dependent and still not very reliable.

ADMINISTRATION WILL BE CONTACTING YOU SHORTLY. Moderators Computer101 or Netminder will return to finalize these if still open in seven days. Please post closing recommendations before that time.

Question(s) below appears to have been abandoned. Your options are:

1. Accept a Comment As Answer (use the button next to the Expert's name).
2. Close the question if the information was not useful to you, but may help others. You must tell the participants why you wish to do this, and allow for Expert response. This choice will include a refund to you, and will move this question to our PAQ (Previously Asked Question) database. If you found information outside this question thread, please add it.
3. Ask Community Support to help split points between participating experts, or just comment here with details and we'll respond with the process.
4. Delete the question (if it has no potential value for others).
--> Post comments for expert of your intention to delete and why
--> YOU CANNOT DELETE A QUESTION with comments; special handling by a Moderator is required.

Click you Member Profile to view your question history and keep them all current with updates as the collaboration effort continues, to track all your open and locked questions at this site. If you are an EE KnowledgePro user, use the Power Search option to find them. Anytime you have questions which are LOCKED with a Proposed Answer but does not serve your needs, please reject it and add comments as to why. In addition, when you do grade the question, if the grade is less than an A, please add a comment as to why. This helps all involved, as well as future persons who may access this item in the future to seek help.

Moderators will finalize this question if still open in 7 days, by either moving this to the PAQ (Previously Asked Questions) at zero points, deleting it or awarding expert(s) when recommendations are made, or an independent determination can be made. Expert input is always appreciated to determine the fair outcome.

The uses clause is one of those things that just tends to grow and grow.
Most of the time this is in the main form, as it's from this form that all others are called.
If you have a big application (including many forms),
the uses clause in the in…

This article explains how to create forms/units independent of other forms/units object names in a delphi project.
Have you ever created a form for user input in a Delphi project and then had the need to have that same form in a other Delphi proj…

Sending a Secure fax is easy with eFax Corporate (http://www.enterprise.efax.com). First, Just open a new email message. In the To field, type your recipient's fax number @efaxsend.com.
You can even send a secure international fax — just include t…